Issue No. 14, Autumn 2015

Mark Benedict is a graduate of the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College. Recent publications include short stories in Bird’s Thumb, Catch & Release, and Swamp. Mark loves loves loves music. Camera Obscura’s My Maudlin Career and the Gaslight Anthem’s ’59 Sound are among his favorite CDs.

Larry Blazek was born in Northern Indiana,but he moved to the southern part because the climate is more suited to cycling and the land is cheap. He has been publishing the magazine-format collage Opossum Holler Tarot since 1983. He has been published in The Bat Shat, Vox Poetica, Leveler Poetry, Five Fishes, Front, and Mountain Focus Art, among many others.

After a twenty year hiatus, C.M. Chapman returned to writing fiction in 2012. His first publication was in the anthology, So It Goes: A Tribute to Kurt Vonnegut. He also published in Cheat River Review and Dark Mountain in the U.K. He is currently developing a chapbook with Latham House Press and is a finalist in the 2015 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Fiction. His piece, “The Desolation Toad,” is part of the thesis collection he produced in the MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College, where he is graduating in August and has accepted a teaching fellowship.

Kelsey Dean spends most of her spare time stringing words together and training her hands to draw the pictures in her head. Her work can be found in several publications, including 3Elements Review, Glint Literary Journal, Neutrons Protons, and Arsenic Lobster. You can view more of her creations here: kelseypaints.tumblr.com.

Rachel DiMaggio writes dark fiction, runs the Freelance and Fiction website and blog, and has been privileged to edit several fiction and non-fiction manuscripts. In her spare time, she enjoys baking, playing video games, and watching horror movies. She and her husband live in Massachusetts, which is perfect because she is guaranteed to get a few snowed-in-with-hot-coffee days every winter.

Ray DiZazzo has published poetry and criticism in commercial and literary magazines, newspapers and books. Some of those publications include: Poetry Now, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Westways, Beyond Baroque, East River Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Road Apple Review, Invisible City, California Quarterly and others. He is the recipient of the Percival Roberts Book Award and the Rhysling Award. He is also a Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has been anthologized in The Alchemy of Stars, Burning with a Vision and Contemporary Literary Criticism. In addition, he has published three books of poetry: Clovin’s Head, Red Hill Press, 1976; Songs for a Summer Fly, Kenmore Press, 1978; and The Water Bulls, Granite-Collen, 2009.

Amy Durant lives in upstate New York and works as a copyeditor and social media editor for the Watertown Daily Times. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Creative Writing from Binghamton University. Her poetry and non-fiction has been published in a number of print and online publications, and her book of poetry, Out of True, was published in 2012.

Susan J. Erickson has assumed the persona of a host of women while composing a manuscript of poems in women’s voices. Her poems appear in 2River View, Crab Creek Review, Museum of Americana, The Fourth River, Naugatuck River Review and Literal Latte. Susan lives in Bellingham, Washington where she helped to establish the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Walk and Contest. Her chapbook, The Art of Departure, was published by Egress Studio Press.

Robert Esposito is a freshman at The College of New Jersey and is currently a prose reader for The Blueshift Journal.

R.G. Evans is the author of the poetry collection Overtipping the Ferryman (Aldrich Press Poetry Prize, 2014) and the forthcoming novella The Noise of Wings. His poems, stories, and reviews have appeared in Rattle, The Literary Review, and Weird Tales, among other publications. His original music, including the song “The Crows of Paterson,” was featured in the 2012 documentary All That Lies Between Us. Evans teaches high school and college English and Creative Writing in southern New Jersey. rgevanswriter.com

Ashton Kamburoff is a poet from Cleveland, Ohio. His work has appeared in Toad, Blast Furnace, Flyover Country Review as well as other literary magazines. He currently lives in San Marcos, Texas where he is an MFA candidate at Texas State University.

Mary Kasimor has most recently been published in Big Bridge, Arsenic Lobster, Horse Less Review, Nerve Lantern, Altered Scale, Word For/Word, Posit, 3 AM, EOAGH, and The Missing Slate. She has three previous books and/or chapbook publications: Silk String Arias (BlazeVox Books), & Cruel Red (Otoliths), and The Windows Hallucinate (LRL Textile Series). She has a new collection of poetry published in 2014, entitled The Landfill Dancers (BlazeVox Books). She also writes book reviews that have been published in Jacket, Big Bridge, Galatea Resurrects, Poets’ Quarterly, and Gently Read Literature. She considers her work experimental—both her poetry and ink/water colors.

Jennifer Lynn Krohn was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she currently lives with her husband. She earned her MFA from the University of New Mexico, and she currently teaches English at Central New Mexico Community College and Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Jennifer is the poetry editor for Fickle Muses and a member of the Dirt City writers collective. She has published work in Río Grande Review, Prick of the Spindle, In the Garden of the Crow, Versus Literary Journal, and Gingerbread Literary Magazine.

Jennifer Lothrigel is a self taught artist. Her educational background in personal and spiritual healing informs her artistic work. She works intuitively, drawing on her environment and inner psychic landscape to tell personal healing stories. She often personifies inner aspects of herself as in these photos.

Jeffrey H. MacLachlan has recent or forthcoming work in New Ohio Review, Eleven Eleven, Santa Clara Review, among others. He teaches literature at Georgia College & State University. He can be followed on Twitter @jeffmack.

Anthony Rocco Messina is an MFA candidate in prose at the University of Notre Dame (2016). His work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and the anthology Taiwan Tales: A Multicultural Perspective (Lone Wolf Press).

Nkosi Nkululeko, poet and pianist, hailing from Harlem, NY, has performed his works at venues such as The Apollo Theater, Nuyorican Poets Café, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Senegalese-American Bilingual School, Lincoln Center and many others. He is a 2015 American Voices Award nominee and a Callaloo Fellow. Nkosi has been published in the Junior Scholars’ Schomburg Review (Volume 10, No. 1, 2012), and in the forthcoming issue of No Token and the 2015 anthology for great weather for MEDIA Press. Nkosi hopes to translate his human experience through text and sound.

Coco Owen is a poet in Los Angeles. She has published poems in Antioch Review, 1913, CutBank, The Journal and The Feminist Wire, among other venues. She has been a finalist in several recent book contests, including the May Swenson Poetry Award, and has a chapbook forthcoming from Tammy. Owen serves on the board of Les Figues Press in Los Angeles. Read more of her work at: cocoowenphd.com.

Rebekah Rempel studied creative writing at the University of Victoria. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Force Field: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia (Mother Tongue Publishing) and Unfurled: Collected Poetry from Northern BC Women (Caitlin Press), as well as the journals Lake, Room, Cactus Heart Press, and One Throne Magazine. Her poems are also forthcoming in Prairie Fire and Contemporary Verse 2. Additionally, she contributed to the Written in Stone Project that displays poetry in a park in Dawson Creek, BC.

Meggie Royer is a writer and photographer from the Midwest who is currently majoring in Psychology at Macalester College. Her poems have previously appeared in Words Dance Magazine, The Harpoon Review, Melancholy Hyperbole, and more. She has won national medals for her poetry and a writing portfolio in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and was the Macalester Honorable Mention recipient of the 2015 Academy of American Poets Student Poetry Prize.

Diane Unterweger lives in Wisconsin. Her poems have recently appeared in Gingerbread House, Naugatuck River Review, and Blast Furnace.